From the Chronicles of the Before Time

I know some days it doesn't seem like it, but I swear to you there really was a Before Time.  

Oh yes there was.  

And like the old man in Ray Bradbury's "To The Chicago Abyss" -- 

“Don't think!" The young man jerked so violently his home-made cigarette fell in chaff to his lap. “Now look what you made me do!" 

“I'm sorry. It was such a nice friendly day — " 

“I'm no friend!" 

“We're all friends now, or why live?" 

“Friends?" the young man snorted, aimlessly plucking at the shredded grass and paper. “Maybe there were ‘friends' back in 1970, but now — " 

“1970. You must have been a baby then. They still had Butterfingers then in bright yellow wrappers. Baby Ruths. Clark Bars in orange paper. Milky Ways...swallow a universe of stars, comets, meteors. Nice — " 

“It was never nice." The young man stood suddenly. “What’s wrong with you?” 

“I remember limes, and lemons, that's what’s wrong with me. Do you remember oranges?" 

“Damn rights. Oranges, hell. You calling me a liar? You want me to feel bad? You nuts? Don’t you know the law? You know I could turn you in, you?" 

-- I, too, now spend a lot of my time wandering the rubble of the modern world, incurring the wrath of seemingly everyone by daring to recall the Before Time in vivid detail.

And do you know get the angriest at those of us who keep talking about the Before Time?

Never Trump Conservatives and mainstream pundits:

He seized the old man's lapels which ripped so he had to grab another handful, yelling down into his face. 

“Why don't I just blast the living Jesus out of you. I ain't hurt no one in so long, I — " 

He shoved the old man. Which gave him the idea to pummel and when he pummeled he began to punch and punching made it easy to strike and soon he rained blows upon the old man who stood like one caught in thunder and downpoured storm, using only his fingers to ward off the blows that fleshed his cheeks, shoulders, his brow, his chin, as the young man shrieked cigarettes, moaned candies, yelled smokes, cried sweets until the old man fell to be kick-rolled and shivering. 

The young man stopped and began to cry. At the sound, the old man, cuddled, clenched into his pain, took his fingers away from his broken mouth and opened his eyes to gaze with astonishment at his assailant. 

The young man wept. 

“Please . . begged the old man. 

The young man wept louder, tears falling from his eyes. 

“Don't cry,” said the old man. “We won’t be hungry forever. We’ll rebuild the cities. Listen, I didn’t  mean for you to cry, only to think where are we going, what are we doing, what’ve we done? You weren’t hitting me. You meant to hit something else, but I was handy. Look, I’m sitting up. I’m okay." 

The young man stopped crying and blinked down at the old man who forced a bloody smile. 

“You . . . you can’t go around,” said the young man, “making people unhappy. I’ll find someone to fix you!” 

“Wait!” The old man struggled to his knees. “No!” 

Because Never Trump Conservatives and mainstream pundits' whole world -- their financial, professional and psychological security -- depends on pretending that past prior to 2016 simply never happened.  That the entire history of the Republican party and the Conservative movement somehow have nothing to do with the GOP party nominating, electing and overwhelmingly supporting Donald Trump.

Because the great danger in assholes like me pushing past the 2016 Temporal Barrier is not that we would suddenly discover that the Republican party has been a shithouse of bigots and imbeciles for decades, but that our new Never Trump allies have been telling the same god damn lies about their Republican party since long before Donald Trump came along.

Here is your humble scrivener writing about the lies that David Frum and David Brooks were peddling way back in 2011.  Pay special attention to the last line, because being reminded that lying about their own, complicit past is what Never Trump Conservatives and mainstream pundits absolutely cannot abide:

Well into their 117th trimesters David Brooks and David Frum both suddenly decide they really don't want to keep Reagan's baby.

Earlier today Mr. Brooks placed his order for a political D&C through pursed-lips and a frowny face by rewriting Reality's Timeline so that he was somehow never a part of the 30-year lead-up to the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the Empire we see bearing monstrous fruit all around us. 

Mr. Frum, more comically, decided instead to pretend that the person most responsible for the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the Empire...was the Reasonable-to-a-Fault Democratic President!Because he has so far failed to put Frum's Republican Party down like the sick animal that it is, and failed to clean up the toxic partisan sewer that David Frum helped create...despite Mr. Frum and every other Conservative douchebag in America being warned to beware just exactly these consequences for the last 30 years by two generations of Liberals: 

Obama's Weakness Made Debt Crisis Worse

... "Then, as Republicans discovered the power of their new tool, the president decided to assume they were bluffing, that they would never actually do anything so reckless. Waking up to the reality of the situation too late, he commenced bargaining by offering what he assumed would be an irresistible deal. Wrong again. The Republicans did resist. So Obama offered an even better deal — which predictably only whetted the GOP appetite for still more. 

...Instead, he appealed again and again to Republicans’ spirit of responsibility. Good luck with that."

Which is such a triumph of pure, lying, cornered-rat-desperate Republican anti-logic that it really deserves to be featured as an exhibition sport in the 2012 Summer Olympics. 

Both Mr. Frum and Mr. Brooks are sticking to the most tried-and-true method of Beltway Insider lying -- namely, heroically disavowing any knowledge whatsoever of their own previous and well-documented actions...

Or, as I wrote several thousand posts ago about Mr. David Brooks, and which applies equally to his entire species of Beltway Wise Men:

...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

One of the most time-honored tools for deflecting blame away from the Republican party every time it births another monster is by inventing a new "-ism" to explain why "Republicanism" wasn't to blame.

Back when Mr. David Brooks was in the business of writing paean's to the genius George W. Bush, the tonic that was definitely gonna save the GOP from cracking up was "Bushism".

The Savior of the Right

Bush hasn't abandoned conservatism; he's modernized and saved it. If we're going to have one of our periodic conservative crackups -- which, in case you haven't noticed, is what we are in the middle of -- let's at least learn the right lessons from the past 10 years.

...The future belongs to post-Bush conservatives. If you want a glimpse of that future, read the speech David Cameron gave earlier this month, which electrified the British Conservative Party conference. Cameron has learned the essential lessons of Bushism.

And when the Bush Administration came a cropper, Ross Douthat was there to pin it on the failure of "Bushism".

And yet in a broader sense, the Goldberg-Sullivan argument doesn't really make any sense at all. To begin with, it attributes a deep ideological consistency to an Administration that's rather obviously been making things up as it's gone along. Yes, Bushism has been defined by (to quote myself) "an accommodation with big government" right from the beginning, and small-government conservatives knew - or should have known - that Bush was no Phil Gramm. But the content of that accommodation has been driven more by expedience than by any kind of intellectually-consistent revision of conservatism.

A decade before Trump came oozing down the escalator, Tom Delay was the deranged racist Republican thug calling the shots.  And the problem with that, according to David Brooks,  wasn't "Republicanism".  It was "DeLayism":

But Republicans need to do more than bump DeLay. They need to put the entire leadership team up for a re-vote. That's because the real problem wasn't DeLay, it was DeLayism...

And recall (if you dare) how quickly Sarah Palin went from Rich Lowry's intoxicating GOP Viagra -- 

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

-- to the toxin of "Palinism" (from George Packer in The New Yorker in 2008):

As for Palin, the incarnation of red-meat, know-nothing Christian nationalism, she turns out to be McCain’s single biggest mistake. The Republican Party’s immediate post-election future will be a bloody struggle over Palinism. It’s already started at National Review online, where the growing hysteria of the posts signals that the roof is falling in on conservatism. 

Which David Fucking Brooks assured his readers in November of 2014 was nothing to worry about because...

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

Now just consider for a moment how many dozens and dozens of times during any given week you hear Never Trump Conservatives and mainstream pundits (and a whole lot of Liberals who should damn well know better by now) lamenting what "Trumpism" has done to the noble Republican party.  

And the thing is, as far back as the first day on August in 2016, my lovely and talented wife planted her flag for all to see, because we knew this was coming.  

Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'

The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump. Who voted for him again?

So where do we now find ourselves just days away from the 2020 election?

We find the most honest Never Trumper of all, Stuart Stevens, still clinging to the belief that...

There are many good men and women in the Republican party...

Except there aren't.

We find Mr. Stevens lamenting all the good stuff that his party has supposedly squandered:

Today’s Republicans are not worthy of the great legacy they inherited.

You mean the legacy of Atwater and Rove? Goldwater?  Cheney and Gingrich?  DeLay and Helms?  Ailes and Limbaugh?   Glenn Beck?  Ann Coulter?  Mark Theissen?  McConnell and McConnell and McConnell and McConnell?

You mean that legacy?

And promising to help in the following way:

So it is with those of us who are, or once were, Republicans now fighting against Trump and Trumpism.

 Cool, except it's NOT FUCKING TRUMPISM.

Flipping over to another Bulwark post also from today, we find Mona Charen wailing and rending her garments because:

Donald Trump Ruined Conservatism. 

Don’t Let Him Ruin Patriotism.

Sad!

Trump has driven people away from the Republican party, and caused them to reject the label “conservative.” I’m inclined to reject it myself, because in the age of Trump, it has become associated with nativism, racism, ignorance, authoritarianism, contempt, and crackpottery.  

"in the age of Trump" my ass.

And because she cannot help herself,  Ms. Charen felt compelled to stop along the way to take a number of gratuitous shots at the Left -- 

We are in the midst of a left-wing fever of revisionism about American history. From the 1619 Project to the toppling of statues of anti-slavery heroes, there is a movement afoot that Bari Weiss calls a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.” Some of this predated Trump of course, but he has turbo-charged it.

 -- before finishing with her main thesis hat the problems with the GOP all began four years ago and were all caused by this thing called "Trumpism".

We cannot permit American patriotism to be hijacked by yahoos and bigots. As we start to heal from the past four years, we must rescue patriotism from Trumpism.

In "To The Chicago Abyss" the old man is eventually taken in by a small group of survivors who appreciate his stories of the Before Time, but realize the mortal danger he is in if he keep shooting his mouth off in public.  So they take up a collection to send him West by train, to where Chicago once stood, and they give him a short list of like-minded people to contact when he gets there.  Here Bradbury is very deliberately invoking the earliest, perilous days of Christianity.   

And so the old man finds himself stuffed in the corner of a train car full of shabby, unwashed refugees, trying hard to keep his mouth shut.  And then he spots a sickly little boy traveling alone, watching him intently.  Hour after hour the boy watches, until...

"‘Sh. Boy. Your name?" 

"Joseph." 

The train swayed and groaned in its sleep, a monster floundering through timeless dark toward a moment that could not be imagined. 

"Joseph . . The old man savored the word, bent forward, his eyes gentle and shining. His face filled with pale beauty. His eyes widened until they seemed blind. He gazed at a distant and hidden thing. He cleared his throat ever so softly. ""Ah . . ." 

The train roared round a curve. The people rocked in their snowing sleep. 

"Well, Joseph," whispered the old man. He lifted his fingers softly in the air. "Once upon a time..." 

That's how Ray Bradbury ended his story.

I wonder how ours will end?

Behold, a Tip Jar!